Let's talk about feel - what is the whole “feel” thing with lure rods, do we get hung up on “feeling” stuff a whole lot more than we need to?

Give me any half-decent, “sharp” feeling lure rod that we might use for our bass fishing, add calm seas and zero wind, clip on something with a relatively heavy jig head like a Black Minnow or one of our new Sandeel V2 Weedless lures, and bump it along a rocky or at least broken sea bed with my rod tip up and what I like to think is at least a mildly deft touch on my part. I am going to “feel” every single little bump and bang and so on as the lure works along the bottom, and feeling a fish like a bass slam my lure ain’t exactly difficult. If I then swim a lure like this I am then going to feel the paddletail kicking and so on…………..

Now add a strong cross wind and/or rough seas and fish exactly the same lure(s) on exactly the same setup in exactly the same way, and whilst I reckon my lure is still bumping along the bottom and working just fine - such thin modern braids with no stretch have got to help in the wind here - how much I can “feel” is vastly diminished however much I have or haven’t spend on my rod. My lure rod hasn’t suddenly become a bad fishing rod with no feel or feedback. I am confident my end gear is still fishing just fine but I have now lost so much of the feel or feedback I was getting in flat calm conditions when there were no winds to catch my braid and put that belly in the line which to me is arguably the single thing which affects things most here.

I see a lot of anglers online talking about how much feel they are or are not getting from their lure rods. Where do you fish and how though? Take me as an angler who has fished with a lot of different lure rods at a lot of different prices (say £70 to over £500), but for all the loveliness that a high end fishing rod can give you with how it casts and “feels” when it’s nice and calm and you are convinced that every little tap and bump and thump you can feel from your lure is miraculously magnified because your carbon’s more expensive (mmm……..), when that wind starts blowing or the seas are a raging, I don’t care how much money a fishing rod costs. The whole feel thing goes right out of the window and you’re relying on experience and almost a memory bank of what your lure is doing even when you can’t really feel it. Different lures give you a different kind of feel for sure, and a Hound Glide kicking away can be felt in at least some way in almost any conditions, but now fish a lure which you might actually need to work a bit rather than just crank it in, and I would suggest that all our lovely pricey carbon isn’t some magical telephone to what’s going on at the business end when you’ve got a great big belly in your mainline. Strong currents are a bit different to me because you can often use that current to straighten your braid out and negate a lot of the belly effect.

Gravity Stick Pulsetail

It’s the conditions and the types of lures which I think really affect how much we reckon we can feel, and I wonder if some anglers buying into this lure fishing thing might sometimes get a bit confused when they are fishing certain conditions with certain lures and are wondering why they can’t “feel” every single movement of their lure and some anglers are talking all about it. For sure it’s a great feeling to get all that feedback when fishing calm or more controlled conditions with a lure that gives off a lot of action, but I would argue that the feel you are really after the most is when a fish slams into your lure. Some lures by the way they swim will naturally give you a lot more feedback - a soft plastic like our Gravity Stick Pulsetail for example is designed so that the body of the lure hardly moves yet the tail “pulses” away like crazy. As much as it’s moving/pulsing though, it’s not kicking hard like our Paddletail which really thumps away and it’s far easier to feel the Paddletail swimming than the Pusletail. There is nothing wrong here, rather it’s what the lures are meant to do. Swim a DoLive Stick on a slowish straight retrieve and if you say you can feel the lure subtly slaloming from side to side then I’m going to call you a liar. The lure IS swimming like this because we know it does, but actually feeling it do this in the water? Balls.

Which makes me then wonder how much some anglers trust that a lure which they can’t feel kicking away like crazy is going to attract the fish. I feel 100% confident these days that lures which aren’t doing very much and which then means I can’t feel a whole lot when I am winding them in are often the ones I reckon catch me more fish - less is more? My co-guiding work over in Ireland when we can bloody get there is a perfect example of this. I remember asking a couple of really nice clients who haven’t been fishing since before they were born to fish with the Sandeel Pencil 125 because I thought the location and conditions called for a lure like this. I know what the lure is doing but when I am guiding I am not the person doing the actual fishing. I know that when I fish with the Sandeel Pencil 125 I can’t really “feel” anything really save for the weight of the lure on the end of your line, but I know it’s actually doing plenty because of how it catches bass for me.

I also understand that if you aren’t used to a very subtle lure like this which doesn’t thump and kick and so on, your confidence levels can really take a dip. When a client asks if we can change back to a different lure which they can really “feel”, of course I am going to oblige because confidence is such a big thing in lure fishing especially and I don’t want to be some miserable swine of a guide who stands over their clients like some expert who can only have things going their way. We want to “feel” what’s going on out there, but how much do we actually need to “feel” and do we allow enough for conditions and lures affecting the whole feedback thing? Surely what you really want to be able to feel is that fish slamming your lure, and save for something a sandeel trying to hit your lure I would suggest that most fish we are targeting are going to make their presence known just fine when they want to kill what we are offering them…………….

Disclosure - If you buy anything using links found around my website, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you anymore to buy via these affiliate links - and please feel entirely free not to do so of course - but it will help me to continue producing content. Thank you.